It is often desirable to connect the fixed electrical terminals of a unit, such as relay switches, with a series of electrical conductors. It would be extremely inefficient and wasteful of labor to manually and successively connect each electrical conductor with its respective electrical terminal, and particularly inefficient whenever more than a few connections are required. To avoid such inefficiency, connector systems enable simultaneous termination of the electrical conductors with the fixed electrical terminals.
An adapter providing an intermediate array of connector elements may sometimes be employed to enable transition from the terminal array of the unit to the conductor array. However, if the pattern of the electrical terminals of the unit does not correspond to the pattern of the electrical conductor configuration, the intermediate connector elements must typically be custom designed to compensate for the varying offsets between each of the electrical conductors and their respective electrical terminals. If numerous connections are required, it may become necessary to employ a wide variety of differing connector elements. However, it is inefficient to fabricate and utilize a different connector element to interconnect each electrical conductor with its corresponding electrical terminal in order to compensate for the varying offsets therebetween. In fact, it is desirable to minimize the amount of differing connector elements needed to effectuate the interconnection of the terminals and their respective electrical conductors.
In accordance with the present invention an electrical connecting system and method is provided for connecting the fixed electrical terminals of a unit with a series of corresponding electrical conductors which eliminates the inefficiencies and the labor intensification problems associated with the conventional connection methods and systems.